Follow researchers, educators and volunteers around New Hampshire who are investigating how people and the climate are impacting our ecosystems.

Wednesday, July 17, 2013

Cutting edge environmental monitoring comes to New Hampshire

Sensors have become an integral
part of our daily lives, from thermometers to networks of wireless
humidity sensors used to monitor fire danger in remote forests.Sensor technology is advancing rapidly,
becoming easier to use and to maintain, allowing us to push the boundaries of
scientific research.Recently, this has become
international news with the sensor technology on the Rover now deployed on the surface
of Mars.This technology is advancing rapidly in the ecological sciences and is now allowing us to
measure parameters in soils and rivers as accurately as we can in the
laboratory.At the same time, the
technology for wireless communications and solar power has also advanced and
become more affordable enabling us to connect sensors directly to our research labs and monitor the environment in
remote areas in real-time.

One of the key ecological questions
facing New Hampshire is, "What impacts are land use and climate change having on
ecosystems throughout the state?" To help
answer this, we have been developing and maintaining a state-wide network of
soil and water sensors as part of the New Hampshire EPSCoR program. The sensors network will be capable of
delivering fine time scale data, which will enable a better linkage between
responses in headwater systems and the impacts on the larger river drainage
networks. It is our aim to link soil
processes to water chemistry parameters by co-locating terrestrial and aquatic
sensor sites wherever possible. The data
we gather will provide modelers with resources needed to develop scenarios for
future change, which can be used by teachers, interested citizens, or environmental
managers wanting to learn more about watershed systems in New Hampshire.

A sensor network is designed to
transmit the data from an array of sensors to a data repository on a computer server. In the case of both our soil and aquatic
sensor networks, various sensor nodes are deployed and are connected to a datalogger
that stores the data and is programmed to tell the sensors when to collect
data. This system is powered either by
hard-wired electricity or by batteries that are charged by solar panels. The data is then transmitted by cell phone modems back to NH
EPSCoR’s data server.

Soils Sensors

With our complex soil sensor
system, we have an array of sensors that examines how soil properties and
processes change as climate in the region changes by monitoring soil carbon (C)
at multiple sites across the state. At each one of our sites we have six
chambers which automatically detect the CO2 being respired by soil
microbes using an infrared gas analyzer.
Paired with each chamber we have three soil sensors installed at the
soil surface and fifteen and thirty centimeters below the surface, which detect
temperature, moisture content and electrical conductivity. We collect basic weather data at each site as
well, such as air temperature and precipitation amounts. By understanding how extreme weather events affect
soil properties and processes as well as stream chemistry, we can predict the
likely effects of climate change on soils and water quality in the coming
decades.

Aquatic Sensors

The aquatic side of the sensors
network is comprised of two main instruments: (1) The EXO2 by YSI is a
multi-parameter water chemistry instrument, with interchangeable sensors
capable of measuring pH, temperature, dissolved oxygen, conductivity,
turbidity, fluorescent dissolved organic matter (fDOM – a surrogate for
dissolved organic carbon), and (2) the Specific Ultra-Violet Nitrate Analyzer
(SUNA) by Satlantic, which measures nitrate concentration.We are also collecting river flow data to
help determine patterns with weather events and climate change. The sensors sample
the selected stream and river sites every 15 minutes. Data on this time scale
will give researchers a detailed look into how streams respond to differing types
of land use or management, as well as changes with storm events.

EXO2 multi-parameter
sonde, by YSI

Specific Ultra-Violet
Nitrate Analyzer (SUNA), by Satlantic

Sensor and communication technology
has advanced rapidly in this field, where this kind of work could not have been
done this way 10 years ago. In the case of one of the sensors, the SUNA can
detect nitrate almost as low as we can back in the lab and is a significant
advancement from previous sensors that had detection limits several times
higher. It is also relatively maintenance free. A wiper keeps things from
collecting in the sample path and a copper guard keeps microbes in check. The
wireless communications are so good that we now can communicate with all of our
sensors even in remote areas of the White Mountains. This is an exciting time
in our field and the quantity and quality of the data we produce will help push
our understanding of our environment. In our next post we’ll let you know what
the challenges we face when installing the sensors.

2 comments:

Thank you for doing this important work! We are doing similar work, on a grassroots scale (farmer initiated) in Vermont. May I ask if there is a map-based interfaced for accessing the data? I would like to connect with you all and learn from your lessons to date. abenewsoil@gmail.com Thank you! Abe Collins